… I’ve learnt a lot under your leadership and I hold your legal brain in high esteem, but I’ve been thinking for a while that we could be doing things a bit more scientifically. I would like to introduce a new management philosophy whereby we measure our performance against industry benchmarks in order to encourage an environment of continuous improvement.’
Feargol looked a trifle confused and there was the merest hint of anger in the edge of his voice.
‘What am I supposed to take amiss, Don? That all sounds fine to me.’
Ah Jock, you’re such a prick. I could really have gone for the jugular at that point, but as Sun Tzu says, timing is everything. I leapt to the defence of my new captain.
‘I don’t think Don was being critical, Feargol. What I understood him to say … is that he’s learnt a lot from you. We all have. But because he doesn’t have your years of leadership experience, he needs to put a system in place, which will quickly give him a more structured and scientific appreciation of the work of the whole department. Is that right, Don?’
‘More or less,’ confirmed Jock, nodding eagerly and gratefully. It’s amazing how someone so dangerous inside a courtroom can be so vulnerable outside. I suppose Jock must be one of those inherently sporting types who never know the battle has commenced until they hear the starting gun.
Jock took another sip of his exclusive and non-criminal Beljean, and then shattered the mood of the chamber with an almighty sneeze that took him unawares. Clutching his coffee and unable to cover his face in time, he sprayed the table with damp shrapnel.
‘I think we might end on that note,’ said Feargol, rising from the table and striding from the room with typical vigour. Jock and his two cronies rose more leisurely and left the room without a backward glance, once more lauding the theoretical applications of ancient Chinese wisdom …
While I sat staring at the centre of the table, where a bright red nostril hair had landed.
•
I seemed to work late that night. At any rate, I was last to leave the office.
I took a taxi to Oxford Street in Darlinghurst — my favourite part of the city. What I like about Oxford Street is the anonymity. You can really be yourself, and no one is likely to care, or even notice. I strolled the northern curb breathing garlic, sweat and stale beer, gazing through shop windows intriguingly blanked out or tastefully overdressed. Most of the crowd around me dressed in black and kept to the left — bohemians and faux bohemians with secure jobs still debating Kafka after all these years. In among them were the tourists — identifiable by their more colourful clothing and their diffidence. But buried deepest in the crowd were the trolls — the blackhearts who no longer belong in the mainstream but float along partly submerged in the greater currents of our times, a danger to all shipping.
For the bourgeois, they are hard to see — it’s always darkest under the lamp after all — but you can find them if you know what to look for. For a start, they have lost all self-consciousness. They are concerned only with the sharp reality of life in Subterrania and their eyes are ever focussed there. They know that human beings are nothing more than opportunities to be exploited and they roam the channels picking out marks, acknowledging each other with professional nods above the heads of the docile flock — wolves in shepherds’ clothing.
The tourists and faux bohemians are a resource to be farmed — to be nurtured and grown, and defended from other predators. But for all their care, only rarely do the trolls rub shoulders with the bourgeois. And, though Oxford Street is teeming with people, the faux bohemians, the tourists and the trolls somehow sense each other’s sonar and avoid each other like bats in a cave.
One such cave was the CinnaBar at the Mercury Hotel. Briefly trendy in the gentrified push of a few years back, it had become too scary for the faux bohemians and had returned to its traditional role as a haunt of criminals and the genuine fringe. As was my wont, I sat across the road in a café, watching the various comings and goings for half an hour. Then, approaching the appointed time, I slipped back into the crowd and navigated my way through gutter creepers and shoals of shoppers flitting about in uncanny unison — browsing, but ever-conscious of threat.
I passed under an archway obscured by two large potted palms into a narrow wet lane leading down to another arch surmounted with pink and purple neon and more palm trees, like a tiny enclave of Copacabana in the pit of Sydney.
At the threshold, I was immediately confronted with the familiar dank, which for all its unpleasantness, I always find strangely soothing. Breathing deeply, I entered a dim room with a greenish light like an ancient aquarium. Only a few were present, mainly clustered round the two pool tables in the centre of the room. The rest were distributed evenly about the darker edges of the chamber in ones and twos, whispering conspiracies and glancing up at me as I made my way to the bar.
The barman handed me a Perrier (with a twist of lime) without waiting for my order. Just as I like to be stoned among the bourgeois, I prefer to stay straight among the trolls.
I nodded my thanks, then turned towards the lone figure in the Che Guevara beret sitting in front of the banks of poker machines in the far corner. It looked like one of the labours of Hercules — one man versus Vegas — but as I approached he reached for his wallet and discovered it was empty.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ muttered Hercules.
‘How’s it going, Xeno?*’
* pronounced Geno
His head snapped round, all ringlets and imminent violence, but then he relaxed and favoured me with a slow reptilian smile.
‘Morgen! Fuck, am I glad to see you.’
Xeno didn’t really fit into any of my broader categories. He had the scamming genius of the trolls, but the appearance and the self-regard of the faux bohemians — a true bohemian, perhaps? Xeno had a foot in both worlds, and for that reason, he was useful to me — useful, but dangerously unpredictable, like a dormant funnelweb pulled from the bottom of a pool. Tonight he was done up like one of Alex’s droogs in A Clockwork Orange, and his incorrigible gambling addiction made it almost a certainty that at some point later in the evening the resemblance would be more than just visual.
I handed him fifty dollars, which he immediately fed into the machine and hit the maximum bet — a loser.
‘Leave it there, Xeno.’
He hit the maximum once more — another loser — then left the machine and followed me to the nearest table, where he could keep an eye on his investment. In fact, he reminded me a little of Jock — so vulnerable, but absolutely invincible in his element.
‘Okay … what’ve you got for me?’
Xeno pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘It’s mainly been pretty quiet,’ he said, with a longing glance at his poker machine. ‘He’s just trying to get his life back on an even keel, I guess. But he’s had a letter from Lucy.’
‘Divorce papers?’
‘No … I think she wants him back.’
‘Really?’
Xeno and I shared a grin, and I handed him another fifty, which he stuffed into his top pocket for easy access.
‘Did you
